My Best Tips for Building Muscle with Calisthenics

Home , Calisthenics, Leg extension, Weight machine, Weight training

Disclaimer: Matt Schifferle is not liable for any injuries or damages that individuals might incur by attempting to perform any of the exercises or feats of strength depicted or discussed in this book. Any individual attempting to do so does at their own risk. Consult with your physician before beginning an exercise regimen.

My name is Matt Schifferle, founder of the Red Delta Project and self-proclaimed odd duck in the world of fitness. I believe crazy things like fitness and staying in shape should be as easy as possible and that success comes from taking short cuts. I also believe that calisthenics is one of the best muscle building methods available.

Of course, I didn’t always believe this. I used to be a barbell-loving iron addict until I was in my early 30s. By then, I had built some muscle and strength but it wasn’t anything to write home about. I was also burned out and battling daily aches and pains all over my body.

On a whim I decided to do nothing but bodyweight training for a month in an effort to rest up. Much to my surprise, my little experiment left me bigger and stronger than ever. Since then, I’ve been on a mission to discover the secrets of building muscle with bodyweight training and I wrote this book to share some of the biggest lessons I’ve learned.

Is it really possible to build muscle with bodyweight training?

A lot of people are skeptical at the muscle building power of bodyweight training. Even I used to scoff at the idea that push-ups and bodyweight squats could rival heavy weights. How could it when your weight doesn’t change very much and it seldom reaches the load you can lift with a barbell?

My perception of what was possible started to change after my little bodyweight experiment, but it wasn’t like I was sold on calisthenics overnight. It still took a year or two before I really respected the discipline of bodyweight training for what it could offer. Since then I’ve learned that not only does calisthenics training have a lot to offer, it will help you build more muscle than lifting weights alone for two very important reasons.

The two essentials to muscle building success

Building muscle requires two essential principles regardless of the type of training you do. These two essential principles are consistency and progression.

Combining consistency and progression produces muscle building magic and calisthenics has unique advantages to achieving both.

The calisthenics advantage for consistency

Building muscle is like building a sand pile on the beach. If you pile up some sand and leave it for a while you’ll come back to find that wind and water have eroded your pile down. The same thing happens with your muscle. It erodes without consistent maintenance and attention. You can’t prevent this sort of erosion, but you can continue to put more sand on the pile to prevent it from becoming smaller. If you do it frequently enough you’ll even make it bigger.

This is why maintaining a consistent training schedule is so important. It’s next to impossible to build, let alone maintain, much muscle when life keeps interrupting your training routine. School can’t slow you down. Work can’t get in the way. Even frequent travel shouldn’t interrupt your weekly routine. If you can’t maintain your training for long periods of time you’ll find your muscle mass will erode just like that sand pile on the beach.

Muscle building success comes from playing the long game and not allowing short term challenges to disrupt your training schedule.

Calisthenics is possibly the easiest form of training to consistently practice for years on end. It doesn’t require a trip to the gym, long workouts or fancy equipment. You don’t need to jump through many hoops to get your workout in which makes it a very efficient and flexible form of training. It’s this efficiency and flexibility that gives it a massive advantage for helping you maintain a consistent training schedule for years on end.

The calisthenics advantage for progression

Building muscle doesn’t just happen because you work really hard and exercise as much as you can. It’s requires continual improvement in how well you can perform your exercises. While hard work is important it doesn’t hold much promise for the results you seek. One of the many advantages of calisthenics is it requires a natural holistic approach to using tension in a progressive way. Take calisthenics leg training for example. Bodyweight exercises like squats, lunges and sprinting require the use of every muscle in your lower body. In contrast a leg extension machine just works your quadriceps.

Why focus on working just one muscle group at a time, when you can condition several at once?

Calisthenics also integrates multiple functional elements as well. Progressing your leg exercises requires you to improve your strength plus mobility, balance, and tension control. Compare this with working on a weight machine that isolates your strength from your other physical capabilities.

Advanced squat exercises develop more than just your strength giving you the best bang for your buck.

The holistic integration of muscles and capability is essential to progressive training. While attempting to isolate a single muscle or capability may seem more effective in the short term, it’s a fragmented approach that can create weak links in your body. Eventually, these weak links handicap your potential as your body struggles to maintain balance. Training both your muscles and capabilities in a holistic way prevents these weak links from holding back your ability to progress.

Almost everyone who struggles to get bigger and stronger fails to do do because of either a lack of consistency or a lack of progression. That’s why the tips in this book are all selected to help you become more consistent and make it easier to progress your training. So without further ado, here they are.

My Best Tips for building muscle with calisthenics

#1 Learn how to progress basic calisthenics exercises

Building muscle with calisthenics is pretty much the same as building it with weights. They both use the same basic principles. The biggest difference between the two is you adjust the difficulty of weight lifting by changing your weight while calisthenics uses a change in technique.

Unfortunately, the art and science of progressive calisthenics isn’t widely known. This causes many people to continue to do their exercises the same way for months on end. Some people understand a few technical adjustments, but these modifications offer limited progress and often require big leaps in progression. This is why it’s essential to have a thorough understanding of how to progress any bodyweight exercise from being ridiculously easy to insanely difficult and anywhere in between. That way, you can adjust the workload on your muscles to the level you need without it being too easy or too hard.

The science of how to progress your technique is beyond the scope of this book but I always recommend Convict Conditioning by Paul Wade as a good place to start. That one volume will teach you more than what most experts know about how to progress bodyweight training.

#2 Keep a log

Progression is rarely made in leaps and bounds. It’s usually made in small, almost tiny, steps in each workout. Sometimes it’s a single extra rep or even half a rep. Other times it’s by tensing up a muscle a little harder. It could even be something like remembering to not hold your breath at the bottom of a squat.

Whatever you do to advance, it’s critical that you remember what you did so you can repeat and build upon a progression from one workout to the next. The problem is, the human mind is a not the best at remembering little details so the very thing your progress depends on can easily become lost.

This is why keeping a workout log is vitally important. It’s like an external hard drive for your brain so you can refer to it and know exactly what to do with your next workout.

Pen and paper are the most essential pieces of equipment in any home gym. Keeping a log also helps your mind search for ways to progress.

This is important because progressions are not always very obvious. Sometimes, you need to really contemplate your training to discover how to improve. When it’s time to write down what you did your mind will have to search for ways to improve next time so you can write that down.

#3 Train for fast fatigue

Building muscle requires you to work your muscles into a high state of fatigue pretty quickly. Compare walking all day vs sprinting up a big hill. Both will make you feel tired but sprinting uses much more energy with each step so it creates a lot of fatigue in the muscles very quickly. This is what I call fast fatigue vs slow fatigue.

Time is not on your side when training to build muscle. Build up that fatigue quickly!

The popular way to practice calisthenics is with an emphasis on slow fatigue. You can find examples where people boast of holding a plank for minutes at a time or doing 100 straight push-ups. As impressive as these feats are, they are not the most productive way to train for muscle growth. Instead, pick an exercise that challenges your muscles hard enough so you can only do it for 30-60 seconds and hit it hard for 2-3 sets. This will ensure you’re training more for muscle and strength rather than endurance.

#4 Improve your tension control

Creating and using muscle tension is the main purpose behind your training. It’s what creates the fatigue that stimulates muscle growth.

Ultimately, the tension in your muscles is created by your mental focus and concentration. Even as you read these words your brain is telling the muscles around your eyes to move so you can look at this sentence. While these words are the reason your mind is telling your eyes to move, they are not directly controlling them. Nothing I write here can force your eyes to look at this page. Only your mind can do that through mental concentration.

Your mind sends signals to your muscles, and your muscle returns feedback which you perceive as tension in your muscle. This neurological loop is the essence of effective training.

Controlling the tension in your muscles is a skill you should constantly strive to improve. Just practicing tensing your muscles in your warm up will do wonders. Pay attention to how tension flows and changes as you do the exercise. Does it move around? Does it fade or grow? Is it different on one side of your body than the other? The more you become aware of how you use tension the better you can manipulate it to make your workouts more effective.

#5 Practice tricky moves more often

Building strength does take some degree of skill in how well you use the tension in your muscles. This applies to all forms of strength training, but it’s especially true for calisthenics. Sometimes exercises like handstands, bridges and even deep squats can feel a bit tricky if you’re not used to performing them.

This is why it’s often a good idea to lightly practice difficult moves on a more frequent basis, maybe even daily. You’re not going to become comfortable doing hand stands if you’re only doing them once a week. Popping up into a handstand for a few minutes every day can help you feel comfortable and improve your skills much faster. Once you get used to doing those moves you’ll find it’s much easier to work hard in that exercise and build muscle.

#6 Bridge like it’s your job

A lot of people struggle to build muscle because of various imbalances and weaknesses that prevent them from using their body in a functional way.

These days, sitting is one of the biggest culprits that makes your front side tight and back side weak. When this happens, you can’t effectively build much muscle or strength just as a race car can’t drive fast with a flat tire.

Bridges are the cure for the modern plague of sitting too much.

The bridging exercise is one of the best ways to stretch your tight front side and strengthen your weak backside. It also helps improve your tension control along your posterior chain which is another problem that can hold you back.

You can find videos on how to start bridging on the Red Delta Project Youtube channel plus there’s an entire chapter on it in Convict Conditioning.

#7 Time your rest periods

The time you spend working a muscle isn’t the only factor to consider in your workouts. The time you spend between sets is also important. This is because the speed at which you fatigue your muscles is heavily influenced by the amount of rest you give yourself between sets.

Compare doing 30 push-ups in two different workouts. In one workout you do 3 sets of 10 with plenty of time between sets to recover. When you rest you kill time by playing on your phone, chatting with buddies of watch the news on TV. You start each set feeling pretty fresh and it’s not too hard to complete the workout.

In the other workout you do the same 3 sets of 10 but only rest 45 seconds between each set. This forces you to begin each set without completely recovering so your muscles become more fatigued with each set. By the time you reach 30 push-ups your muscles are on fire and screaming for mercy.

Timing rest periods can reduce workout time, provide structure to your workout and create more hypertrophy stimulating fatigue.

Both workouts use the same time under tension but the rest periods are different thus creating a different amount of fatigue in the muscle.

Don’t get too hung up on how much time is optimal to rest. What’s most important is having consistent rest periods. If you rest 1 minute between sets 1 and 2, but 3 minutes between 2 and 3 you have an inconsistent rest time which can be problematic in the long run. In general, short rest periods are more difficult while longer ones are easier. I usually recommend starting with 45-60 second rest periods and adjust according to what feels best for you.

#8 Add in weights

There’s not much sense in being dogmatic about only training one way unless that’s what you prefer or if it’s important to your goals. Personally, I only train with bodyweight because that’s what I prefer and lifting weight would compromise my mission to learn how to get the best results from using calisthenics alone.

I know you’re not me, so don’t feel you can’t do a little pumping iron if you feel that’s best for you. Some people find that calisthenics improves their weight training and vice versa. So if you’re itching for some basic weight lifting go ahead and mix it in.

There are a number of ways you can mix weight lifting with calisthenics. I recommend alternating which method you use within basic movements and exercises. For example, one workout involves handstands and bridges and the next includes overhead presses and deadlifts. This will keep the basic movements you’re working consistent through your training while working with both methods.

#9 Fix your pain

Pain is not weakness leaving the body. It’s weakness invading it. It doesn’t matter if it’s joint pain, muscle pain or even mental pain. I guarantee it’s holding you back.

Unfortunately, pain is often perceived as something to accept and endure. Some people even perceive their pain as a badge of honor and take pride in it as a sign of being tough. I’ve been down that road far too many times myself and it leads to nothing but a dead end.

Pain is muscle building poison pure and simple. It eats away at your strength and halts your mass gaining potential to a dead stop. If you want to make gains you have be intent on eliminating it as much as possible. Don’t try to self-diagnose and treat it with temporary Band-Aid half-solutions. Seek out a professional diagnosis from a doctor or therapist, figure out the true cause is, and get it taken care of.

#10 Abandon the all or nothing mindset

The all or nothing mindset can handicap both your consistency and your progression. It creates a mentality where you approach your training in black and white terms where things are either perfect and worth doing, or imperfect and a waste of time.

When you have an all or nothing mindset your motivation to train is on an on/off switch. If you can’t train perfectly or “the correct way” then why bother training at all? This leads to skipped workouts and long layoffs that disrupt your consistency.

Ironically, trying to train perfect can slow down your progression. When you believe you’re doing everything right you stop looking for ways to do things better which is the key to making progress.

The solution to the all or nothing mindset is to throw out the on/off switch and put your habits on an adjustable dial. You don’t have to do everything perfect to keep taking consistent action. You also don’t have to do things the definitively correct way to make progress. Adjust what you can do as life dictates and strive to improve whenever possible.

Upgrade from all all-or-nothing mindset to an approach that allows flexibility and adjustment as life warrants.

#11 Eat to reduce stress and satisfy your appetites

There are two approaches people like to take when it comes to their diet while trying to put on muscle. In one camp you have the “eat big to get big” crowd. This belief states you must be in a calorie surplus to pack on beef and usually consider gaining fat as part of the process.

Then you have the “eat right” crowd which usually involves following a restrictive dietary dogma that forbids ingestion of meat, grains, carbs, fat and so on. In this case, hunger, cravings and a sense of deprivation are the necessary evil.

As in many things in life, the best answer is usually somewhere in between these two ideas. While you don’t want to gorge yourself you also don’t want to eat like a bird either. And yes, eating quality food is important, but you don’t want to be too restrictive either.

The ultimate solution comes when you consider the role diet is supposed to play in the muscle building process. Your diet doesn’t directly stimulate muscle growth, that’s what your training does. Instead diet is part of the recovery process that is sandwiched between training sessions.

Your recovery is vitally important for your success for two reasons. First, it helps you recover from the previous workout, and seconds, it helps you get ready to crush your next workout. Your diet is part of recovery process so it makes sense to optimize your diet for stress reducing recovery rather than stress inducing gluttony or deprivation. Here are a few simple guidelines to help with that.

- Eat a solid 3 square meals a day. - Drink plenty of water. - Adjust portions to satisfy hunger without stuffing yourself. - Include plant based foods at each meal. - Include some form of protein at each meal. - Listen to your hunger. If your body needs more food it will ask for it through a spike in appetite. - Limit or eliminate alcohol, drugs, and other forms of substance abuse.

These simple guidelines will give you a flexible framework to base your food choices off of without the stress of both over eating or deprivation.

#12 Sleep and destress

Diet isn’t the only important part of your recovery. Sleeping enough and relieving the stress of life is also very important. I would even say that lack of sleep and too much stress are some of the biggest hurdles that prevent people from building the muscle they want.

Like with diet, it pays to not overthink your sleep and recreation habits. Here are a few basic guidelines to help you out.

- Set a regular bedtime and try to get a solid 7-9 hours each night. - Sleep in a cool dark room and avoid screen time before bed. - Have a wind-down routine like taking a shower or reading to help you get ready to sleep. - Aim to play and have a little down time each day. Don’t wait for the weekend to cut loose and have fun. - Don’t over rely on destressing methods that involve screens. Watching TV, video games and killing time online may not be work, but they are not play either. - Get outside for some fresh air and sunlight each day. Go for a short walk or just hang out on the front porch without your phone. - Be social. It seems this day in age, we spend more time watching screens than spending time face to face with people. - Play games, practice a hobby or get creative in the arts. Life is too short to just work, train, sit in traffic and stare at screens.

In general, do things that make you feel alive. Don’t put off your life for “someday” when you have the time and money to retire on a tropical island. Just like with training, doing a little bit of R&R each day is better than doing a lot in random chunks.

So there you have it my friend 12 of the best lessons I can give you about how to best build muscle with calisthenics training. Of course, this isn’t everything, but it is enough to cover a lot of the really important stuff. Also, keep in mind that these are general guidelines you can experiment with. I haven’t talked much about specific details because things like calorie or protein requirements are different for everyone. Providing recommendations on such things would be more of an educated guess on my part. There’s even a good chance any such recommendations could be wrong for your personal needs.

Success in anything, especially fitness, is a creative process. It involves some trial and error and there is no definitive manual that will have all of the answers you personally need. More importantly, a lot of the answers you need won’t come from the opinion of some expert who doesn’t even know you. You’re the one who’s experiencing your life so take these ideas and apply them as you wish.

I invite you to learn more about the muscle building potential of calisthenics through my YouTube channel, Facebook and Twitter feeds plus the R.D.P Podcast. Also, feel free to reach out to me at [email protected] with any questions I can help you with.

Be fit & Live Free,

-Matt Schifferle